Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

274 • INTELLIGENCE REFORM AND TERRORISM PREVENTION ACT OF 2004public and private websites. The Beirut airport bombing of 23October 1983 was a textbook example of Hezbollah using humanintelligence in the form of supposed ice cream vendors, who casedthe airport terminal and noted the routines of the U.S. Marines Corpsguards, and also technical and open source intelligence in the form ofengineering plans for the construction of the airport terminal.Following the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks ofSeptember 11, 2001, the United States and other nations targeted byterrorism have debated the relative merits of having a more centralizedintelligence system instead of the pre–September 11 decentralizednational intelligence system with several agencies duplicating datagathering and analysis. While the virtues of centralization may seemintuitive, such a system runs the risk of institutional groupthink thatwould distort both the process of data collection and that of analysis.A system of multiple and often competing intelligence agencies maysuffer from the unwillingness of institutional rivals to share their information,but the redundancy of this system makes it less likely that allagencies will be blinded by the same groupthink. Following the Israeliintelligence failure that allowed the surprise attacks on Israel during theOctober 1973 war, the Agranat Commission convened to investigatethe cause(s) of that failure. The Commission noted that threat assessmentof possible attacks was centralized in the one agency responsiblefor military intelligence, where a pervasive groupthink ruled out thepossibility that the Arabs would dare attack Israel and discountedcontrary evidence. In addition to debates over the relative merits ofdecentralized versus centralized national intelligence systems, there isan unresolved debate over what constitutes “actionable intelligence.”Some of the same voices that faulted U.S. national intelligence agenciesfor failing to predict and therefore to help prevent the September11 attacks also criticized the administration of George W. Bush fordeciding to launch the 2003 invasion of Iraq on the basis of scantintelligence. See also INTELLIGENCE REFORM AND TERROR-ISM PREVENTION ACT OF 2004; FOREIGN INTELLIGENCESURVEILLANCE ACT (FISA); GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATIONSYSTEMS; USA PATRIOT ACT OF 2001.INTELLIGENCE REFORM AND TERRORISM PREVENTIONACT OF 2004. Public Law 108-458, under Title 50 of the U.S.Code, was passed by Congress on 6 December 2004 and signed into